Glitch
by Crow-Black Dream
Summary: Two paladins unexpectedly find themselves bonding over technical difficulties.


Author's Notes: Obligatory disclaimer stating that I do not in any way own Voltron. Set hours after the season 2 episode 'Shiro's Escape.' This is the revised version with (hopefully) all typos corrected. Thanks to all of you who have reviewed and/or saved to your collection of favorite stories, and a nod to you readers in the future.

Summary: Two paladins unexpectedly find themselves bonding over technical difficulties.

Pairing: 1x5

 _ **Glitch**_

 _ **by Crow-Black Dream**_

The middle and ring fingers of Shiro's Galran arm twitched with a surge of heat in the blood. It came as a sudden distraction from the dull anger that was welling up in his chest. He shook out the mechanical flare, took another bite of his meal and looked around to see if anyone noticed.

Pidge was the only other occupant of the table. Following the latest scrape she was exhausted to the point of moving in slow motion and unenthusiastic about the tasteless lukewarm goo Coran dared to dish up, as Hunk was literally sick and tired and unwilling to cook. Nobody made a fuss over the food while the yellow, blue, and red paladins ate and quietly excused themselves in favor of showers and bed while tireless Allura processed the influx of battle information on the bridge and Coran tended the kitchen.

Shiro's mind had been too busy to notice their departure, churning since Ulaz opened the space-time warp from within the latest newly-named robeast. What information about Voltron and the Galra perished with the alien? What did he know about him? More importantly, what did he know about the arm? How many other resistance fighters were out there?

Add the guilt of knowing Ulaz had sacrificed himself for Shiro and his team. He sighed and rested his forehead in the palm of his real hand. He'd been so foolish to think the paladins and the Alteans were solely responsible for their escape from the ship, and now one of their few allies was gone. His mind drifted over the muddled future battlefields, trying to see how far the team would have to go to break Zarkon's reign.

Another cramp in the elbow flexed his fingers into a fist and sent crackles of pain searing up the inside of his arm. With his good hand he clutched at the malfunctioning limb and stifled a groan while the fork's structure began to change in his grasp. It was less like stainless steel, more like warm pliable candlewax. The Galra arm was glowing dull purple with heat. It required considerable willpower to set the melted fork down and hold his hand away from the flammable tablecloth. The heat began to dissipate nearly as soon as he brought his attention to it.

"That's not normal," Pidge commented on the melting silverware trick from where she was leaning heavily on the table and sat straight up.

"No. This arm must not be fully healed," his mind raced for an excuse as the arm fully relaxed.

"I thought the cryopod repairs cybernetic body parts."

"It has to, otherwise the arm would be useless."

"Maybe your run-in with that witch affected the circuitry?"

"Maybe…" Shiro turned his hand over and extended his fingers to reassert control.

"Well let's see if we can fix it," the younger paladin pushed back her chair and stood up. "C'mon, I'll get you all hooked up."

The air in Pidge's room was still and warm. The desk served as the room's main feature with its extensive setup drawing attention away from the rumpled bed tucked back into the corner. It was cozy despite with the vaulted ceiling reaching up into the darkness. Here it was difficult to imagine they were soaring between the stars.

Shiro slipped his shoulder out of his jacket and settled into the extra chair near the soft blue glow of the computer screen, the arm resting on the desk while Pidge fished the proper cable from a drawer of cords and adjusted the lighting level. It was a custom-built wire she pieced together because, after all, alien technology did not come with a proper connection for her computer.

The green paladin took her leader by the hand and flexed his wrist to expose the port, trying to control a blush in her cheeks. The prosthetic's metal was usually warm with body heat, and though the alloy tendons whirred faintly with each little movement it somehow felt like a human hand. Now it was remarkably hot. The sensation made her think of old cars she'd seen occasionally over the course of her life, the last of the gas beasts with wide steel hoods that concealed complex motor hearts spewing power and heat and fumes… and the peaceful warmth of steel and the tick of a cooling engine left thereafter. Most vehicles simply didn't operate at such high temperatures these days. She lingered a moment with her thumb caressing the carpal plate as she wondered how the skin of his left hand felt, if it was warm or cool, how different the bones would feel compared to metal. Slowly her eyes wandered up to the scarred flesh his one bared shoulder. It was faintly bruised despite the cryopod's healing properties and the lateral point of his collarbone looked all wrong, like it had been broken too many times. The things he must have witnessed, things beyond the most terrifying recesses of her imagination, things that she feared she would someday see…

She caught herself in the moment with a flinch when she looked up and saw his dark gray eyes watching every move she made with a ghost of a smile on his lips. Nervously she cleared her throat, connected the cable and turned to face the monitor.

Shiro was astounded to discover that he felt every little trace of Pidge's fingers. Although he'd been alone with the tech paladin and he knew the feel of her hands both in camaraderie of battle and sparring matches and in the trusting embrace they shared when he revealed his knowledge of her real name, he never truly appreciated how deceptively fragile those hands felt. He knew he had enough tactile and thermal perception to allow him fine motor movement but since he'd lost his original arm nobody had touched him so tenderly. Even before then it had been a long time. This thought brought his attention back to Number Five who, judging by her blush, also enjoyed the human contact.

"It's amazing how intricate this is. Just the fact that a prosthesis has the technology to allow me to interface with it so thoroughly is advanced way beyond the top-gear stuff you'd get on Earth, but the way it was constructed is just phenomenal," the green paladin tapped away at her keyboard to pull up a schematic diagram on the screen. "Under these dermal sheaths everything runs just like the muscle and connective tissue in a living arm. It looks like the fascia feeds power to everything by using your bioelectric field. The muscles appear to be similar to fiber optic cable running in the same patterns as natural tissue fibers. The bones are exactly the same, they're just made of alloy rods. It's almost like they took an anatomical scan of a human body. As a matter of fact, that must be what they did."

Shiro's lips were fixed in his characteristic passive smile yet he remained silent. Pidge adjusted her glasses as she inspected the arm's internal workings through the computer screen, glanced over at her comrade and interpreted his expression for what it was. "But I'm sure you'd rather just have your real arm."

The Voltron leader looked off into the shadows around them. "I can't lie, I'd rather have the broken and mangled mess they took."

Pidge's voice softened with sympathy. "Do you remember that?"

He shook his head. "Some of it, not what happened before the amputation. It's not like they would've wasted all that time and tech and effort on a perfectly good human."

"You're still a perfectly good human," his teammate said somberly and let a beat pass for emphasis before getting back to her task.

Shiro smiled genuinely at this. His expression froze, the grin took on undertones of horror as the inescapable bits of memory bared themselves again: strapped to a table in a sterile, purple-lit room with the horror-inducing screech of a rotary blade drawing closer and closer until it was not just a screech but white pain at first and the horrid sensation of flesh and bone being torn through, then nothing as the nerves were severed, and he thrashed and railed against the restraint until his right arm tore free at the elbow and he shrieked and shrieked at the sight of his own bloody limb. They'd kept him awake for the entire thing. His mind wasn't strong enough to repress it all. With his good hand he rubbed the memory from his eyes.

Pidge was too absorbed in her computer work to notice. While her attention was trained on reading codes, his was drifting around examining the room's scant furnishings. Finally he settled on a mirror on the wall behind the computer. His reflection stared back, barely recognizable in this haggard lighting. The bags under his eyes, the white shock of hair, the young pink scar, all were visible enough in his own mirror. Here in this dim light he suddenly found himself questioning how old he truly looked to others while he tried to remember exactly how old he was. Twenty-two? Twenty-three? He couldn't remember after so long without the sun and seasons. Unequaled skills earned him the pilot's seat for the Kerberos mission only a few years out of the garrison program, but the absence between the expedition and prisoner status had aged him considerably.

The black paladin turned his attention and studied his teammate in that moment, noticing the heart-shaped face, the porcelain skin and the freckles sprinkled across the nose, the golden eyes and thick sweeps of ginger hair. She was a youthful seventeen years, and a trace of sadness worked through him as he wondered how time in space would weather her.

His mind broke away from the thought as a heat wave amped up in his arm yet again.

"Hang on!" Without thinking he ripped the cord from his wrist just as the arm began to glow a radiant purple. Pain lit up the inside of his arm, radiating into the jaw and ribcage. His breath was coming in ragged breaths now. His vision tightened into a narrow scope while colors and shapes blurred together. Through gritted teeth he hissed, "Stop… just stop."

"Shiro! Are you okay?" Pidge's voice was at his side, yet it sounded distant as another electrical storm rode up the brachial plexus of nerves and caused him to double over with his eyes wrenched shut. She could only guard her leader from falling, one hand on his shoulder and one hand on the small of his back. In the flickering blue light of the computer she could see the shadowy fibers of scar tissue running in vertical sutures across his nose and cheeks.

He glared at the alien appendage. Pidge saw all the frustration he'd fought to suppress sharpened in his eyes. There was a certain angry desperation, and she suddenly understood that he was fighting for control. He'd lost control of his original mission and he'd lost control over protecting the passengers in his custody - her family. He'd lost control over his freedom and every aspect of his life except survival, and he had to fight for every last scrap of that. He'd lost control over his destiny and now he was barely keeping control over the monstrosity which was now part of his body.

Shiro focused on working his lungs until he had enough breath within him to reply, "…Fine now…"

The depth of his vision righted itself as he registered the warmth of Pidge's hands and he turned to see her steadied in a wide stance, the shortest paladin ready to catch the tallest.

He straightened his fingers to unclench his fist, trying to dispel the heat of the sustained cramp as sweat studded his forehead. When the tetanus wave passed he turned to her and offered a pained smile. "I'm sorry. I hope that didn't damage anything."

When she saw he was not about to keel over she backed off and took her seat. Her voice trembled a little as she tried to dismiss it, "Nah, better than digging melted plastic and soldered wire out of your arm. You'll have to try harder than that if you want to inflict some damage. Hey, did you know that years ago people had to click buttons that properly disconnected storage chips? If they didn't they could lose all the data."

"It's hard to believe we've come such a long way," Shiro nodded at the non sequitur with his wrist bent to reconnect the cord.

A few wordless moments elapsed, punctuated by the tapping of keys. "Okay, I've got a diagnostic program running that cross-checks the regulatory system's current status against normal standards of operation."

"Sounds great," the black paladin said as optimistically as ever.

"It'll take more than a second. Hang on, I'll be right back." The team tech slipped into her closet to fetch a washcloth. Shiro watched her jump several times to reach the top shelf, unable to assist her while tethered to the computer, but also secretly happy to witness a small affirmation of her femininity. It had been a long time since his sympathetic nervous system relaxed enough to let him think of the fairer sex. He'd always liked short girls (opposites attract, he reasoned) and he saw Pidge's minor struggle as adorable.

When she disappeared into the private bathroom to wet and wring out the cloth Shiro turned to look at the pictures affixed to the wall near the monitor. There were four in all: a trimmed snapshot of a middle-aged woman holding a briefcase as she walked through a door. He knew her name was Colleen, as Sam Holt has spoken of his wife all the time during the Kerberos expedition. Next to it was a wallet-size professional photo of scientist Sam Holt himself. On the other side of Dr. Holt was a garrison photo of Matt in his dress uniform taken on his graduation day. Lastly was the image that haunted Pidge's memory, when she was visibly younger by almost two years and long-haired, standing next to her brother in his training flight suit with their arms around each other.

His heart ached as he gazed at the faces. During the months he spent piloting Dr. Holt and his son to the Plutonian moon they became friends. He told them about his life, sometimes in quick anecdotes and sometimes in arcing tales, just as they did with him. Through their stories he caught glimpses into the personalities and pasts of Colleen and Katie. He knew the alias of Pidge was a family nickname that came about when she was a toddler learning to speak. Unable to pronounce her name, Katherine Paige, she became Katie Pidge permanently.

He thought of her father and brother somewhere out there in boundless planes of space. Guilt descended upon him yet again. He could not help them right now and he felt angry with himself for allowing them to slip from the front of his mind, especially when Pidge was here with it weighing on her almost constantly.

"Those are the pictures that were used for their funeral," she pointed at the individual photos of Sam and Matt as she returned with the washcloth, which Shiro took gratefully and held its heat to his forehead.

"Funeral?" was all he could say.

"After your ship lost contact, they waited so long until the party was declared dead. There was a prayer service at our church, then there was a big funeral held by the garrison for all three of you. People were packed into the building," her voice thickened with grief, "and there weren't any caskets there, just these three life-size pictures. Dad, Matt, and you, all with gaudy wreaths. I think yours had white roses. It was only the second time I'd seen your face. Once through the glass when you were all in pre-flight quarantine, then this picture of you surrounded by flowers and mourners. I remember looking around at the wall-to-wall people, thinking you had such a big family, so many friends…"

The details of the funeral were etched into her mind. She recalled her mother shuffling around like a zombie, the parade of eulogies. The flock of journalists outside the garrison who swarmed her for a series of snapshots only to be chased off by a screaming Colleen whose snarling face later made it to the news. The overwhelming smell of flowers aggravating her allergies on top of the natural headache that occurred with crying. Remorse that she could not simply accept their deaths and grieve properly.

In the rare moments of rest Shiro had found during his incarceration he occasionally wondered if they considered him dead back on earth before self-preservation quashed the thought and spurred him on through the seamless days. The sudden knowledge that his family actually held his funeral twisted in his heart.

"Then…when you came back… it was like seeing a ghost. Even though I could never believe that any of you were dead, even though didn't know I you at all, discovering you strapped down inside that ship will always be one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Not only because you looked like you'd been to hell and back, but also because my dad and Matt weren't there with you."

They didn't look at each other then as they remembered their perspectives during that moment.

"Shiro, do you think they're still alive?"

Atop the fact that the men were taken long ago, he had never seen the Galra work camps. He did not know of the conditions, nor did he know of either Holt's health. He had slashed Matt's knee to disqualify him from the coliseum exhibitions; by now the boy could be dead from sepsis or deemed unfit for labor if his captors didn't wish to tend his health, which yielded that darkest consequences of all. Shiro had yet to forgive himself for being too violent in his theatrical attempts to disqualify his friend from the death match. Though it pained him to lie to her, he looked at Pidge and smiled another one of his subtly reassuring smiles, "Yes. They're strong and they're smart. They're resilient. And we'll find them."

Number Five could hear the uncertainty in his voice. She cautiously returned a hopeful smile just the same, for it was all she could do until she found her family. A blinking green line of text caught her attention. She turned to the monitor, typed a command, read the information while he waited in patient silence.

"Hmm. Long story short, you've got a glitch. It looks like the program's set to operate within a certain temperature range so it doesn't burn the flesh of its host, meaning you," she pointed at him without looking away from the screen, "which leads me to believe the tech is meant to be adaptable for different life forms. When you had that run-in with Zarkon's witch the energy that shorted out the regulatory system's programming reset the optimal temperature to be much higher than your body's 98.6 degrees. That phantom arm thinks your body is freezing so it's evoking a mechanical equivalent of sustained muscle contractions to generate heat. You're lucky it hasn't fried the flesh where it attaches. It's not a constant problem, instead it flares up at certain intervals. I've already put in the command to reset the controls. It's pretty much done. I just need to check a few more things, make sure that's the only issue here…"

When all was satisfactory she closed down the windows and turned to face him. "And we're done. How do you feel?"

Number One cautiously tested the range of motion in his elbow, wrist and individual finger joints. No fireworks in his nerves. "As well as can be."

"Great. If it starts glitching out again get a hold of me right away."

"I will." Rather than unplug the cable himself he extended his hand to her. When she made her move he clasped his fingers around hers and covered them with his left hand. "Thank you, Pidge. Katie."

"No problem." Her eyes darted away. It was only the second time he'd said her true name, and though it carried a sense of vulnerability when others knew the secret, the way he said it with such an air of protection made her blush again, the rising heat obvious now in her pale flesh. Moreover she could feel the residual heat and metallic texture of his right hand juxtaposed against the warm, rough skin of his left palm.

They sat eye to eye, knowing separately and together in their hearts that this was all wrong: each was caught off-guard here in this bedroom, neither ready for more contact, both aware that they were too close to complicate their bond. Their duty as guardians of the universe came first.

Even so, they were two lonely humans navigating the same strange path. They found peace in simply holding hands until Shiro stood and pulled Pidge to her feet, then all the way off the ground as she giggled. "Walk me to the door?"

"You've gotta set me down first."

He did, but not before whirling around in a circle with Pidge's feet swinging out. They stepped slowly toward the door, the green paladin faithfully in place at her leader's elbow. There they faced each other and unabashedly entwined their fingers, silently saying more than words ever could.

At last he squeezed her hands tight and let go. "Goodnight, Pidge."

"Goodnight, Shiro."

When he had gone the young paladin rushed past the computer and dove into her bed where she snuggled under her blankets and grinned madly, pulling the linen tight around her to keep her heart from soaring out of her chest.

Voltron's leader strode quietly to the viewport windows and looked up with the craggy features of his face aglow under the light of a passing galaxy. He threw a quick look over his shoulder at the door from whence he came, aware that the young woman on the other side was one of the only creatures in the universe who knew he was alive. He stared down at his hands, savoring the dual sensations he had felt against hers. Tomorrow he would return to the warrior's life and this spell of serenity would be broken. For now he was content to be alive in the starlight.

 _++End++_


End file.
